Commusings: AGING — Grudgingly, Gratefully Gracefully by Schuyler Grant

Or, listen on Spotify

Dear Commune Community,

“If the young knew and the old could.” Yes, this old trope is biting at my ankles like a pesky no-see-um.

I’m not sure I know or can at this moment. Every time I think I’ve got my thumb on a field of interest, something new arises to confound me. Like when you bring a torch into the evening, it reveals the vast obsidian darkness of the night sky … such is the way with knowledge. The more I know, the more it unveils what I don’t know.

And my back is out again. It’s a shame, as I’m 23 years old again on the tennis court – for about half an hour. Then Father Time flexes his biceps and sends my multifidus into spasm.

But every harvest moon, my mind and body yoke. I know and can. And it’s these fleeting intoxicating moments that propel me forward – reading, listening, doing pull-ups and squats. I suppose the world will get the best of me, in every sense.

I joke with Schuyler, “Like a tart cherry jam, you’re remarkably preserved. You still look like a teenager … from a car park away.”

She claims that she ages 5 years with every 10 yards. A few years back, when Phoebe was a precocious 12 and Schuyler 46, they were strolling down Ventura Blvd. A car full of testosterone approached behind them. From the rear, they looked like 20-year-old sisters. Hearing the catcalls emanating from the muscle car, they turned towards the college boys, who recoiled in horror. These bowls of porridge were too young and too old.

After 36 years of entangling our root systems, I am reminded why I fell in love with Schuyler. And, of course, you never fall on purpose. Her writing is entrancing … and has put me into a long trance. I hope you enjoy Part 1 of her musing today.

Here at [email protected] and waxing alternately poetic and pathetic on IG @jeffkrasno.

In love, include me,
Jeff

P.S. If you are inclined to support my writing, I would be profoundly grateful if you’d pre-order my new book GOOD STRESS: The Health Benefits of Doing Hard Things. Schuyler took an editorial meat tenderizer to it … rendering it both more flavorful and digestible. If you pre-order now, you’ll unlock early access to Chapters 1 and 2 of the book — text and audio. And … receive $900 in Commune course bonuses featuring Schuyler, Dr. Mark Hyman, and Dr. Casey Means, among others.

 • • •

AGING:
Grudgingly. Gratefully. Gracefully.

By Schuyler Grant

I want a rich, multiple, dazzling life. I want abundance, recklessness, sumptuousness, and the heights of passion up to the hilt.

I don’t generally get too bent out of shape about aging. But then… there’s a quote like that one from Anais Nin. And it gets under my skin a bit. Different but similar to the ache I feel when I see a mother nursing a baby. It’s the undeniable loss of a certain time of life. 

Now I hear the umbrage coming from women my age… we can have abundance, et al in our latter decades. And yeah, sure. But the full exuberance for having it ALL to the hilt is just over. Wisdom – and just plain complacency – are too abundant after a certain point to create the conditions for this kind of full-throttle pursuit of dazzle. Or maybe that’s just me?

As my kids cycle out of childhood – the youngest being 14 going on 40 and the oldest being 20 going on 12 – I am turning my attention to how I feel about this next era. I am thinking about my own mother more than I ever have. (And she’s given me a lot to think about.) Generally, I feel exceedingly lucky in my mid-50s. This is not to say that I am not well aware of the myriad things that are deteriorating, physically and mentally. But overall, I’m pretty good at focusing on what is going right instead of what is going south. Yes, I observe more and more women my age looking younger and stranger, but I have decided to forgo the slippery slope of cosmetic intervention. (Though I certainly understand the appeal.) 

I feel pretty ‘average’ as I wrestle this bear. But I’m actually not sure that’s true. So, I decided to conduct a thoroughly unscientific survey of women in the two decades enveloping me, to try to understand where I sit in this business of navigating aging. I asked this cohort of 35 women for the 3 words that immediately come to mind when they think about getting older, as well as what they are afraid of and what they are looking forward to. The responses were at once unsurprising and illuminating. 

Two women who don’t know each other sent me the same 3 words, in the exact same order: Wisdom. Loss. Freedom.

So true. And poignant. Because the older we get, the more we know in our (increasingly brittle) bones that we can’t experience true wisdom – or freedom – without loss. In fact, “wisdom” came back as one of the words nine times. Intermixed with wrinkles, perspective, glasses, hanging flesh, courage, onion skin, vag dryness, humor, arthritis, graceful, grey hair, journey, discovery, a trade-off and inevitable.

But perhaps my favorite triad is from a friend from elementary school: Lonely. Gross. Peaceful. 

When we were 25, could feeling repulsive and isolated ever be a companion to peace? (Did we even seek peace?) And is there anything rawer and truer to the condition of driving around in an aging meat wagon than sometimes feeling lonely and gross?! Bring on the wisdom.

I wrote my own 3 words before I solicited others, and wisdom was – blush – not one of mine. I went for some alliteration: Grudging. Grateful. Graceful. Perhaps not in that order.

GRUDGING?

I love to travel. But I suffer from a peculiar travel-related disorder. When I am away from home somewhere exquisite – on the Osa Peninsula of Costa Rica, say, cradled by unspoiled nature and the pleasures of great food and company – I am beset by a low-grade malaise, knowing that the pleasure will all too soon come to an end. I want to cling to the sweetness of the experience so much, I am a little sick with it. And it’s a strange relief when I’ve returned to my humdrum home, because I don’t have to worry about the ending of something so delightful. 

There is a similar feeling to turning the corner into the second half – or if I’m more honest with myself, more like the last third – of life. The clinging to youth (which we all intuitively know is futile) is over and done with. And no, I’m not returning to a home base… but it is somehow a return to a familiar place. One that I saw my mother, and before her my grandmothers, and the whole river of women navigate for decades.

In case you’re calling bullshit on my denial that I’m clinging… perhaps you’re right. I am still on the front side of this aging business. My superficial body has started to betray me plenty. But on the inside, I still feel pretty damn good. Despite the undeniable hormonal shifts, the insomnia, the occasional arthritic feelings in my joints, I’m able to run and climb and bend and bow. My immune system does daily battle with all the junk my kids drag home. I can drink a few too many glasses of wine and feel OK in the morning (despite a bad bout of insomnia at 3:33), so the liver must be chugging along.

But when it comes to the humbling process of witnessing my diminishing collagen and accumulating age spots and wrinkles, I am working hard at being sanguine. 

Here’s my feeling about cosmetic intervention. I get it. Vanity is a hard habit to kick. But cosmetic ‘work’ is a crazy slippery slope. You might fixate on that deep crevasse of worry between the brows. Just a touch of botulism. Cool. No biggie. But then… those furrows around the mouth start to look… well not just annoying… but within your power to control. Or at least for 3 months until the filler starts to dissolve. And then that truly annoying waddle under the chin — when the hell did that appear?! But that one requires a knife. But, then again, the results are more lasting… So, maybe?? You get my drift.

My personal take on aging is rooted in feminism and a disgust with the nightmare of late-stage capitalism. Women are still objectified incalculably more than men, and everything seems to have a price tag, for those that can afford it. 

Railing against the deterioration and treacheries of the body and the relentless and startling blows to our vanity is not unique to women. The obsession with turning back our biological clock is surely as old as the spark of consciousness about our mortality. Cautionary tales about the dangers of seeking everlasting life well predate Dorian Gray. Sometime during the first millennium, Taoist alchemists in China attempting to transmute one material into another in their quest for eternal life, mixed sulfur and saltpeter and accidentally created gunpowder. (I wonder if they noted the irony of creating the first weapon of mass destruction in their search for immortality.)  

But what I chafe against most is the iniquity between the way men and women carry this psychic burden. Even in cultures that have more respect for the elderly and wisdom lineages, there is an undeniable value – one might say fetishization – of the young and fertile female. I simply refuse to comply with any aging dogma that is not enjoyed by men as well. 

All that being said, now might be the best time in recent history to be sweating through our bedsheets.

We are in the process of a major cultural “turning of the wheel” regarding women’s health and agency. The cracking open of the current conversation about menopause is a prime example. The proliferation and elevation of experts, doctors, and everyday women speaking to, learning about, and demanding medical support for a biological issue that is as natural as birth and death is preposterously overdue. It’s hard not to rant about how long overdue this is, but no use crying over spilt blood. Here we are… and it’s a good time to be going through any variety of hormonal changes, because research, awareness and investment are all moving in the right direction. 

My hope is that a culturewide conversation and reckoning with the American obsession with women’s looks will soon follow. The trope of the weathered-but-still-hot man and the ingenue is so well-worn that we comfortably inhabit it. Look up who Sean Penn, Bradley Cooper, or Leonardo DiCaprio are currently dating. And be appalled that you're not surprised. 

The larger issue is not just sexuality – women’s as well as men’s – but a re-visioning of the value we place on our parents and grandparents. As Jeff likes to say, allowing older generations to be elders, not elderly. We are making slow progress in this regard (evidenced by the efflorescence of institutions like Chip Conley’s Elder Academy) but we still have a long way to go before older women are seen as queens, not crones.

I am my ancestors' wildest dreams. It’s the title of a children’s book. But it’s also a good kick in my pants when I sink into an abyss of despair about where we are at culturally and politically.

This essay will continue in next week’s newsletter with Part 2: Graceful and Grateful. Apparently, I have a lot to say on this topic… 

P.S. This Commusings was inspired by our upcoming event, Luminescence, a women’s health and longevity summit that features many of the wise woman doctors who have helped me understand myself better during this time in my life. 

Welcome back ladies (and gentlemen), last week I began this extended musings on what it means to age as a woman with an unscientific survey of 35 women on the 3 words that immediately come to mind when they think about getting older, as well as what they are afraid of and what they are looking forward to.

My words: Grudging. Grateful. Graceful.

I made it through Grudging. Today we continue with the holiday appropriate…

GRATEFUL?

In the often startling, but never surprising, congruity of the mother-daughter current, last week, as I began wrapping my head around penning this essay about aging, a snail mail arrived from my mother which began thus:

“I remember a hilarious incident from our shared pasts, those of long-ago when you were younger than 20: I was driving you to school (in my ‘Toodle-Bug’) and you moaned at me that you had wrinkles. I suppose I might have looked, not sure of this, but I do remember that I first wondered if I had wrinkles too. I looked in the rear-view mirror and saw that I did and I was surprised. There they were! I don’t remember having a negative take on that discovery. I feel so lucky to have had not a very long time of thinking/obsessing about my appearance. So nice. So freeing.”

Well, I remember another incident from our shared pasts. Not too many years after this one. I was in my early 20s, and I was on a visit home from college. My mom was engaged in a tumultuous affair with a much younger man. I returned home to find a small tub of anti-ageing face cream on the counter. And this somehow encapsulated how deeply repulsive and sad I found the whole situation – not just the facts of it, but that it should have made my mother aware of her wrinkles at last. It broke my heart a little.

The mother-daughter web is an intricate lattice of hopes and fears and expectations. Fulfilled and nebulous. And is it just me, or do most women find their mothers uniquely gross? (There’s that word again.) Yes, yes, my mother is one of my favorite people on the planet. My heart aches in advance for the world I will inhabit without her on it. But there is no one else I find quite as uniquely repellent. Her dirty fingernails. The way she slurps her food. The idiosyncratic rumble of her belch. 

Although I consider myself quite sanitized compared to my own mother, I occasionally see my daughters looking at me with undeniable revulsion. Is it because we know we are grown from their flesh and fluids? That we were spit out of their vagina or sluiced from their belly? The intimacy of this is maybe just too much. But I don’t think sons feel this way. So perhaps it’s because, in a completely preconscious way when we are young, and increasingly obvious as we grow older, we know that we are slowly but surely becoming our mothers. And even if we adore and admire them, we still find this horrifying. This is a very particular way we bear witness to our own aging process from the time we are very, very small.

I am both grateful and resentful for my mother model. When the first labor contractions hit me, I remember thinking, “Mom! You’re so full of shit!!” My mother’s blithe – and on occasion exuberant – attitude about the things that women usually dread has been both a blessing and a curse. “Childbirth isn’t painful,” she told me, “it’s just like some deep cramping. You just need to breathe through it. I didn’t even push!” 

She had a similar hot take on menopause. Didn’t notice a thing apparently, no symptoms at all, one day there was a period, then there wasn’t. Let’s just say – my experience was a little different. I’m very grateful to have been spared a baseline set of fears around the vagarities of womanhood, but it also, frankly, sometimes felt like gaslighting.

I am acutely aware that I am inevitably a funhouse mirror for my own girls. I do, however, have a few hacks I try to live by so I don’t spend excessive time and energy getting bent out of shape about aging. Here goes:

The first is to remember that you are never going to be younger, and probably not younger looking, then you are right now. I very distinctly remember that time I was 15 or 16 and, looking in the mirror in the car, registered that my body was already in the process of aging. The next pivotal moment of feeling old (while still quite young) was in my mid-20s while struggling with whether or not to continue pursuing an acting career. 

After an unsuccessful pilot season, I had a meeting with my agents, and in that meeting they suggested that I develop a relationship with a plastic surgeon to “get ahead of my face.” I looked in the mirror (back in a car again!) and saw what they saw. There was a lattice of fine lines around my lips that I’d never noticed before. I called a friend. “Oh! Your cat’s ass!” she said. But some things you just can’t unhear. That’s the day I quit acting. Feeling old when I knew I was still so very young was just not a head trip I was willing to be on. 

Then, as time went on, I started noticing how I would look back at myself in old photos and think about how good I looked. Somewhere in my mid-30s, I said to myself I’m done with this — I’m going to feel the best I can with what I’ve got right now, because I know I’m going to look at myself 10 years from now, and then another 10 years on from that, and the Schuyler from a decade prior will always look damn fine. So I’m working on being that hottie now. (It’s NOT always easy – like I said, it’s a hack, not a solution.)

My second method for upending my internal superficial nag is to spend more time and energy acknowledging the things that are still looking pretty good, instead of fixating on the things that are undeniably deteriorating. Most of us have a terrible tendency – and I have to work really hard at this one – to see what’s wrong and bypass the things that are solid. I really, really hate how when I bend over and look at my knees, there’s a weird pocket of skin above my kneecaps. Like I could store a snack in there for later in the day. I also hate that I’m developing, some creepy skin around my neck. But do I look at my hair and think “Wow I’m so lucky, I’ve still got nice, thick hair, without any particular effort on my part.” 

Now, I don’t do this very often. But I’m trying a practice of saying something nice to myself, whenever I catch a snarky inner voice trying to take me down. And if we look a little deeper, and think about all the things that are going right inside the body, almost all of the time, there is an infinite world of things to appreciate. Yes, things breakdown more often than they used to. Sometimes we are hit with serious illness or injury, but most things are working miraculously right most of the time.

This leads me right into hack number three. Even if we can’t stop the inevitable deterioration of our outer layer, we can feel better in our phycial and metaphysical bodies for a very long time, if we tend to ourselves artfully and lovingly. In some ways, I am lucky that I was in chronic pain in my teens and 20s. It was awful – but having navigated through decades of hard work to find a way to be pain-free in my mid-50s is a real triumph. 

I confess that I’m not much of a gadget person. I don’t track my steps and I like my aura as energetic cloak instead of a wearable. But I do pay a lot of attention to what I put in my body, and what I do with my body. And having a deep faith that the body is designed to repair and heal is kind of superpower. Inevitably these joints will give out and I will have to put my tennis racquet away, but our emotional/spiritual self can be cultivated until it’s time to call it quits. So, I’m keeping my yoga mat rolled out and my meditation cushion propped up for the long haul. 

GRACEFUL?

Another quote from Anais Nin: Our culture made a virtue of living only as extroverts. We discouraged the inner journey, the quest for a center. So we lost our center and have to find it again.

I look at the first half of life as a process of expansion and accumulation. Collecting experiences, sexuality, careers, family, heartbreaks, and triumphs. And the second half of life rolls into a process of consolidation and letting go. Shifting identities, pause and proceed. The realization that our children never really grow up — as we imagined anyway. The fear and the reality of disease and the death of our parents and friends. The ache I feel for my youth is not for my ever-diminishing collagen. It’s for the access I had to my daughters soft, snuggly bodies. The certainty that life was a wide-open horizon, instead of a winding path through thick woods.  

The illusion that we can really do anything about the ravages (the caresses?) of time — is just that. An illusion. An expensive and energy consuming illusion. What else could you do with that time? Those funds? That energy. An illusory sense of agency is a prison of the mind. Succumbing to the inevitable is a kind of freedom.

To me, it feels a bit luxurious to sink into the bath of acceptance. And when I bend over and meditate on those ever-deepening pockets above my kneecaps — do I love that?!?  Absolutely fucking not. But I just stand up straight and stop looking at it, and I think about how grateful I am that these legs are still operational, even if they are encased in an increasingly crepey sheath. I look at Jeff and find his deeping wrinkles and the spray of grey in his pelt of hair charming and an affirmation of all the years we have loved each other. And I am certain that he sees the same in me. 

I’m sure we would find a sip from the fountain of youth impossible to refuse, but we are both secure in the knowledge that there cannot be joy without pain. And there cannot be wisdom without loss. Or life without death.

When asked about what scares them about the prospect of aging, this is what my ladysurvey came back with:

Not having enough time to do all of the things I want to do. 

Getting a disease. Suffering. Lacking connection with humanity.

Dementia. Medical costs.

I’m scared to lose friends and loved ones. 

Suffering. Lack of mobility. Inflammation! 

The most unsettling part about aging is that time is limited.

Physical pain. And illness has entered the picture, right? More friends with cancer. More parents dying, unwell. Lately I’ve also become weirdly anxious about losing [my partner] to death or illness. Like super anxious. It seems I absolutely adore him and don’t want him to die.

Loss of beauty/vitality. The reality of the world/environment.

When prompted to reflect on the things they look forward to as they age, these are some of the reflections I got:

Community and creative expression. Giving less of a shit about the small stuff. 

Adventures with my partner.

With age comes deeper relationships (mostly with a circle of amazing women in my life). My interest in health/beauty/vitality is motivated from a very different place.

Giving back. 

More being/less doing. So much less drama (or my interest/capacity for it).

I’m hopeful when I see others age in a way I hope to age. That is, they continue to stay physically active, challenge themselves mentally/continue to learn and grow, use their skills, stay involved in the world/community around them, and keep their sense of humor. I look forward to the challenge of aging like those who inspire me. 

Fewer expectations placed on me. 

Growing into myself in a way I could not before. (I think being an old lady will fit me.)

Coziness.

One of my dearest friends added this to the end of my little survey, “I have an awareness of the invisibility of women as they age, but for some reason it doesn’t feel terrible. It feels like a liberation?”

This was affirmed in the unsolicited letter I received a few days later from my mom, who just this month is rounding the bend into her 9th decade, which ended:

“And now OMG! The freedom when you arrive at a seriously ‘old’ age. I hardly have to care about what anyone thinks – at least as regards my appearance.
Let it sag! Let it wringle!
I am free to be me.
Hee hee.”

I don’t think women have a midlife crisis, so much as a midlife reckoning. And making peace with aging is an act of gracefully surrendering. Countering fear with humor. Clinging with creativity. Ultimately, it’s a letting go of the human fixation with the binary and the linear.

I will let the perennially wise and relevant Ms. Nin have the last word on this:

We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.

P.S. This Commusings was inspired by our upcoming event, Luminescence, a women’s health and longevity summit that features many of the wise woman doctors who have helped me understand myself better during this time in my life.